Happy St. Patrick's Day!

As most people who know me can tell you, I love desserts.  And I particularly love holiday desserts, especially those kind of, well, silly holidays.  (Not that I think saints' days are silly, per se.  It's just that, let's face it, here, for most people, St. Patrick's Day is just a day for corned beef and green beer.)  Anyway, I like days where I can get a little silly with desserts:  St. Pat's, April Fool's Day, Halloween.  So I was really loving making dessert with the girls this year.

Although I would have dearly loved to make the Irish Cream Mousse cake I saw a recipe for, my target audience is a little too young yet for such a thing, so our St. Pat's desserts usually center around rainbows.  Last year, we had really cool looking rainbow cupcakes (think tie dye).  This year, it was....Jello.  I saw the idea on the last page of a magazine, and thought it would be the perfect dessert.  Don't ask me which magazine, I don't know.  I don't remember, and more to the point, I couldn't find it when I went to make this yesterday.  But, it's Jello, how hard is it?

We used 6 large boxes of Jello in the following flavors:  cherry, orange, lemon, lime, berry blue, and grape.  Also, boiling water, a glass casserole dish, and non stick cooking spray.  We had six flavors, and 3 girls available to help, so each girl picked two flavors to make.  I'd like to say I took pictures, but the truth is, I mostly forgot.  Something about supervising young kids pouring boiling water....

Here is the first layer.  The colors in the picture aren't very true, but we started with grape.

I started to follow the pacakge directions as to amount of water, but soon figured out that at that rate, there was no way all six packs were going into that pan, so we switched to the Jigglers recipe starting with the blue layer.  By the way, see that smudge in the middle?  That's my fingerprint.  Yep, the Jello was set enough to pour the next layer.

Here's the blue.  I didn't take pictures of each layer, I promise.  The lighting in my kitchen was not great yesterday, so there wasn't really much definition between the colors.

Here is Katie, getting ready to mix her yellow, which was actually the fourth layer we added:

And here is a square of the finished product:

Isn't it pretty?  It didn't look like that in the pan at all, but once the light was shining through it, you could really see all the colors.  I served it with a "cloud" of whipped cream.

This was Maddie's first experience with Jello:

She actually stopped eating to pose for the camera.  Here is Emma and Katie:

And here is Abby:

Nope, not a ham in the whole Hansen clan!

One last shot of our pretty (and silly!) holiday dessert:

(And good news!  There's lots left over, for my secret bedtime snacks!)